Moonwatch spies on more than lunar sights

When the Soviet Sputnik went up on Oct. 4, 1957, so did hundreds of amateur telescopes across America. They were already in the hands of school students as part of Operation Moonwatch, given to them by astronomer Dr. Fred Whipple, director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Mass.

Whipple, who was born on Nov. 5, 1906, wanted youth to view meteors and comets during the International Geophysical Year (July 1957-December 1958). For scientific viewing, the student amateurs participated alongside "tens of thousands of professional scientists from sixty-seven different nations staffing hundreds of stations around the globe," said "Moonwatch: Keep Watching the Skies." For satellite spotting, Whipple's network was ideal for tracking the Soviet hardware. The students reported their sightings to the SAO, which then computed the orbital data.

The New Mexico Museum of Space History displays two Operation Moonwatch telescopes, which were actually used in Alamogordo. A family whose father had died was sorting through his mementoes, discovered the instruments, and donated them.

Moonwatch "was probably the largest single scientific undertaking in history," the website nationmaster.com said. "Until professionally-manned optical tracking stations came on-line in 1958, this network of amateur scientists and other interested citizens played a critical role in providing crucial information regarding the world's first satellites.

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"Whipple saw the opportunity," said "Moonwatch: Keep Watching the Skies. "If the Americans and Soviets were going to launch the world's first satellites, someone, he reasoned, would have to track and photograph them."

A June 11, 1963, SAO press release stated that Whipple's network of a dozen cameras on six continents "photographed more than 60,000 satellite transits." At the SAO, a Baker-Nunn camera, according to the June 30, 1963 Boston Sunday Globe, could track "objects É 1000 times dimmer than the human eye can see roughly. In a successful test the instrument showed the ability to track a shiny 30-calibre bullet in the skies over New York City."

Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Tom Rich, of Alamogordo, participated in Moonwatch while at Clackamas High School, Oregon. He said each scope covered a 15-degree area of the sky, and that they had enough viewing instruments to watch the entire night sky.

"When Sputnik went by," Rich said, "whoever had it in their telescopes knew the stars there and drew it on their map. At dusk, we saw it going over the far horizon. We did catch it at four consecutive revolutions around the Earth."

As the satellite moved between known stars, Rich said a stopwatch helped them calculate the satellite's speed. He and his fellow amateurs, from schools throughout the area, persevered in the "chilly nights" of northern Oregon in October, he said. Their work earned them national attention: Life magazine published their pictures. They were "spoken about on Russian radio," he said; and, they were awarded "a free trip to a space symposium in San Francisco," on which they arrived by train.

Whipple, in his 97 years, became an expert on the solar system. He was one of the first to discern that stars other than our Sun emit radio waves; six comets he discovered bear his name; and, the asteroid Whipple was named for him.

"But it was his work on the icy conglomerate model for comets that is regarded as the highlight of his distinguished career," said his obituary on bbc.co.uk.

In 1950, Whipple published a paper that countered the accepted theory of comets being nothing more than flying particles loosely held together. According to bbc.co.uk, in 1986 "the Giotto Mission came close enough to Halley's Comet to photograph its nucleus, (and) it looked just the way Whipple described it 36 years before." By then, the media had dubbed comets dirty snowball.

As a child, Whipple had hoped to play professional tennis. Then, polio struck. He found his new passion when he took a high school astronomy course, said amazing-space.stsci.edu. As a graduate student, he helped map the orbit of the newly discovered Pluto. In 1931, Whipple joined the Harvard Observatory. During World War II he was project director at the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development's Radio Research Laboratory. A biography in the New Mexico Museum of Space History Archives said he guided "the development of 'Window,' the Confusion Reflectors which helped Allied bombers penetrate the German radar screens." Amazing-space.stsci.edu said Whipple's device sliced "shreds of aluminum that, when dropped from planes, confused German radar."

From 1949-56, he chaired Harvard's astronomy department. At the same time he worked on meteor photography while doing upper atmospheric research, as director of the U.S. Navy Ordnance Bureau.

Whipple joined the SAO in 1955, and "built the moribund group he inherited into one of the leading scientific organizations of the world," Dr. Donald Menzel wrote in the foreword to "The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple." Eight years later, President John F. Kennedy honored Whipple with the President's Award for Distinguished Public Service.

In 1981, the Smithsonian named its observatory in Mount Hopkins, Ariz., the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, "in recognition of a distinguished American astronomer," Sky and Telescope magazine reported in December of that year.

Whipple had directed the facility's development and construction. He was also "pivotal in initiating the development of the revolutionary Multiple Mirror Telescope, which now operates successfully on that mountain."

When Whipple was 92, NASA named him to the Comet Nucleus Probe mission. The license plate on his car, said amazing-space.stsci.edu, simply read "COMETS."Michael Shinabery is an education specialist and humanities scholar with the New Mexico Museum of Space History. Email him at michael.shinabery@state.nm.us.